108 to the new Cuba, as American will after the Spanish-.i\.merican War of 1898. It doesn't signify what the infant culture of Cuba intends. The first part of the trilogy ends with a shot of LucIa frozen in a scream, or a howl for the aid of history. The second Lucia, seen in 1933 and played by Eslinda Nuñez, is a languid beauty with a bad-tempered mother who suspects her husband of being un- fdithful. \Ve are in an epoch of parasols carried bv womanl} women trained to look prett} for people whose bookkeep- ing of small grievances leads to a life of squabbles and malaise. Lucia nearly attains a new balance for herself when she discovers the hiding place of a young revolutionary called Aldo, lives with him, works, and protests against the dictatorship of Machado, whose vested interests are at one with the new colonizers'. But the revolt is disorgan- ized, and its hopes lead to a worse sys- tem. She and Aldo find themselves at odds with a weak1ing couple whom they had thought revolutionary. Aldo is killed in a gun battle, Lucia has to iden tify his hody in a morgue, and pro- test dwindle" for lack of theol) and communion. We might as well be back in the world of parasols. In the first part, love IS betrayed because it has been used as a stratagem: given Lucia's al- ienation from society, Spain's need of military information about a danger- ously rebellious outpost can be satisfied In the second part, love is betrayed be- cause Aldo, Lucia, and un- met others are on their own in refusing to comply with the comfortable. And in the third part, a furiously comic short story, love is betrayed by possessive- ness. Though living in Cas- tro's Cuha, a jealous husband called T omás literally walls up his beautiful, newly bed- ded Lucia by nailing boards over the windows and forbid- ding her all visitors. He goes wild with anger when a handsome stranger comes in with government approval to teach his bride to read clnd write as part of the new Cuba's literacy program. It is all a dark plot to take women away from men and give them independence, he thinks, instead of making them follow the colonial pat- tern of submission to the power of mclchismo This third sto ry, in which Lucia is played by a beauty called Adela Legra, is the most lib- THE CUR.R.ENT CINEMA Scamps H UMBERTO SOLAS'S "Lucia," the Cuban three-part epic of love and revolution from 1895 to some unnamed time in the nineteen- sixties, was first glimpsed in New York at a 1972 festival of films made in Castro's Cuba. It was quickly closed by a Batistan release of white mice, and then came the American Treasury De- parttnent's seizure of the film. Now sense has won. Showing the picture, which is a thoughtful, ironic study of women in Cuba, is no longer for- bidden. The film-all two hours and forty minutes of it-says with mount- ing energy and comic spirit as its three episodes go on that things have now changed, but that they can change only a little while machismo still reigns. The fi rst part of the film has the spirit of a mid-nineteenth-century Ital- ian opera written for a love-maddened but musically ambitIous coloratura. (What a surefooted director, to be able to go eventually from this to the final part, which is like some wildly lugubri- ous Italian farce about male jealousy! ) The Lucia of 1895, played by Raquel Revuelta, lives in a Cuba where the male population is being decimated by the Spanish oppressors. She seems cer- tain to end up a spinster, and finds it overwhelming when a handsome stranger called Rafael courts her and \ "')0.< <<. . to. J # y ,.... . i ... - \\III! .... MIlt <01<" -- ". ",> # " proposes. He obviously feels he can deal with her suffocating girlish confidences, from which she excludes the existence of a brother who is a rebel in the tnountains. But Rafael, It turns out, already has a wife and child in Spain. Operatic despair. In spite of that, a tryst with the forbidden woman-ex- ploiter, who becomes her lover. A plan to elope. In the midst of the elopement, though, Spanish-paId bngands catch up with them, and Rafael unchivalrously flIngs her from their shared horse. Lucia's brother and the rebel army are massacred, and she stabs her lover to death In the town square when she finds him in Spanish uniform. Lucia's own life has been murdered, the film implies, because she is in a country where the socIety's forms are borrowed-in this case, from Europe. By some miracle of filmmaking, the ensuing insanity of the heroine is made to seem credible through Solas's insight that when the grip of Spain loosens, Cuba is thrown back into primitivism and robbed of life because the new so- cIety has lost the onl} language it ever had. Not only Lucia but the Cubans of her time are left to stutter like children angry with themselves because they haven't yet learned the words for what they mean. The old language of the Spaniards has turned out to be un true o t j f\ ... . - .^ . o,,;k" 6.,. 5 :.... :.. : " .:. # *" - - . w . > 4of". '" '" '" \. ... ((Damn it, I just can't conceptualize in a Pinto!" , API\I L 8, I 9 7 4-